New Yorker Writer Lauren Collins on Her Wonderful New Memoir About Language and Identity

When in French, a wonderful new memoir from New Yorker writer Lauren Collins (full disclosure: we once worked together and remain friendly), begins in Geneva, as the author, wielding only “passable restaurant French,” negotiates a mystifying, landlord-mandated appointment with a non-English-speaking chimneysweep. After a debacle involving a matchbook and a disc of cork, Collins bids her creosote-smudged visitor a cheerful au revoir. She was, she writes, “trying to regain his confidence and my standing as chatelaine of this strange, drab domain. ‘Hello’ and ‘good-bye’ were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn’t apprehend. It felt as though the instruction manual to living in Switzerland had been written in invisible ink.”

How had Collins—hailing from charming, provincial Wilmington, North Carolina, the child of northern parents who encouraged intellectual, if not geographical, exploration—found herself a stranger in the very strange land of Geneva? It was, she writes, a “faintly sinister” city whose reputation for “imperturbable security” and “discretion” were actually just a cover, “bourgeois respectability masking a sleazy milieu.”

A few years earlier, the author had bucked an inherited inclination toward risk aversion, and moved alone to London. There, she met Olivier, a French mathematician from a Wilmington-like seaside town near Bordeaux, who spoke fluent English, but groused that doing so “is like touching you with gloves.” They fell in love, and following a bumpy cross-cultural courtship—they spoke in endearments like bebe and mon amour, but only because they couldn’t pronounce each other’s names—they married. When Olivier’s job took him to Geneva, Collins followed, upending the balance established in their early relationship—“his continent, my language”—and forcing her into direct confrontation with the francophone world.

“For me, the first move, the physical one, had been easy,” the author writes of her attempt to learn her husband’s native tongue. “The transition into another language, however, was proving especially wrenching.”

When in French is primarily about identity, and how much of one’s sense of self is tied up in language, an especially heady concern for a writer as adroit as Collins, for whom “English is a livelihood.” It’s also a central preoccupation of linguistics, defined by two opposing schools of thought: Whorfian linguistic relativism, or the belief that language shapes our experience of the world, versus Chomsky’s universal grammar, which holds that speech is as innate and subconscious as “breathing or walking.”

Collins offers up her own love affair as a case study, applying the tools of the social sciences to her life, and offering, along the way, a primer on linguistics and semantics and a cultural history of language. But if that makes When in French sound boring or academic, I’ve given you the wrong impression: Collins’s memoir is anything but dull. She’s analytical, but never clinical, with a reporter’s keen ear for nuance, and her curiosity about words—the meaning beneath their meaning—is infectious.

“You are performing a feat of interpretation any time you attempt to communicate with someone who is not like you,” Collins writes, paraphrasing the critic George Steiner. Anyone who has ever fallen in love can relate to the thorniness of translation and interpretation, what’s lost in the attempt to speak someone else’s language, and what’s found. (One delightful example: When Collins, several years into her romance, suddenly realizes she can understand Olivier on the phone with his brother, and picks up on his overuse of the French word quoi. “Even as it dawns on me that I may have pledged lifelong fealty to a man who ends every sentence with the equivalent of ‘dude,’ I’m taken by an eerie joy. Four years after having met Olivier, I’m hearing his voice for the first time.”)

“It’s a phenomenon that I think everyone experiences,” Collins told me by phone when I called her in Paris, where she, Olivier, and their 17-month-old daughter now live, to discuss her book. “Every couple is a ‘bi’ couple, in some way. I wanted to write something that addressed that.” We chatted more about why she chose to write a memoir, why she resisted learning French, and whether bilingualism may prove an occupational hazard.

This is a memoir but it’s also a cultural history. Did you always imagine it as a hybrid? I knew it was going to be hybrid. And I thought that the balance of it might tilt more toward reported than it did in the end. To be honest, I was a little bit hesitant about the prospect of writing in the first person. I hadn’t done a lot of it before. And of course I couldn’t silence the girl reporter in me, who wanted to research and interrogate and immerse myself in these larger things I was thinking about.

But the great surprise of writing this was that I am a gigantic narcissist! I’m kidding, but I really expected the more personal parts to be kind of agonizing to extract, and they weren’t. So, there’s probably more of myself than I might have imagined at the very beginning.

It’s very obvious, reading this, how much pleasure you take in words: English ones, French ones. I kept having a vision of you as a little kid with a dictionary, marking the new ones you learned, like Ione Skye in Say Anything. That wouldn’t be too far off. There was this side of me that never felt that I was fully of the place where I was from. I grew up in this laid-back southern beach town, but I had these northern parents who had a much different set of priorities, whispering in my ear: Broaden your horizons! I was in one sense this kid who was sent to sleep away camp and was like, you can’t get a newspaper in this place? But I think I learned very early to suppress or to compartmentalize some of that idiosyncrasy and curiosity, for a certain period of my life.

Is that to say: You were marking your dictionary words in private? The beauty is that reading is such a solitary pleasure, so you can be the person who is out running around with the other kids, and then you can go home in private and commune with your dictionary. Nobody ever knows the difference.

The book is really about identity, the way it’s shaped, or not, by language. The story of your relationship with Olivier is also about identity: the transition from single to partnered. Was your initial resistance to learning French in a way a resistance to the latter? I wish I had talked to you about that at the time! I think in hindsight, maybe?

Learning French was one of those things that, in a perfect world, you’d love to do. It was just infinitely put-off-able. There was never any real urgency. When we met we were living in London, speaking English. I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to learn French, in the same way that I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to go to Machu Picchu.

I salute the people who are motivated enough to do something like that without a real catalyst. The kick in the ass I needed to get serious about it was becoming closer to Olivier’s family, and realizing how much I was going to miss out on, in the sense that neither could I understand a lot of what they were saying, nor could I contribute. I didn’t like the feeling of sitting around the dinner table being this big lump.

I totally agree with you that the language difference is like an exaggerated version of something we all have to contend with when we’re thinking about merging ourselves into some serious partnership. People go through it in many ways: Couples come from different languages, cultures, religions, races, ages, whatever. You have to find a way to communicate.

One of the key things in the book was that quote from the critic George Steiner: We don’t only translate between languages, but inside languages. I think any time two people are trying to come together, they’re having to translate in different ways. The thing about the language [barrier] that became sort of helpful was that at least it was a concrete manifestation of [that].

In a way, Olivier begins to make more sense to you when you begin to learn French: his emotional reticence, his reserve, is built into the language. I think the thing that’s most striking to me, speaking as a person coming to French as my second language, is just this distinction between public and private. Coming from English, there’s this undifferentiated you: just, hey you, to anybody you’re speaking of. With the vous and the tu, I feel like I’m drawing boundaries every time I speak. And at first I hated that. Every time I uttered the second person subject of a sentence, I was revealing myself to be some kind of gigantic snob. We’re told as Americans that everyone is equal, and it’s such a kind of inescapable tenet of our culture [that] in our language, there’s no distinction.

No matter how much I speak French, it never seems entirely natural to me. The idea that you’re having to make these split second choices, about what level of intimacy you attribute to a person every time you open your mouth. But it’s also about this entire register in French that I don’t really think has an English equivalent. We have profanity, slang, all these things you wouldn’t say in front of your boss and mother. But there’s a whole register of words in French that I still don’t entirely grasp. There’s nothing wrong with them, per se, but you can’t say them in many kinds of company.

Do you worry that all the time you spend speaking French affects your writing in English?I find myself disproportionately using the verb “propose.” It’s a worrying sign. I try to be vigilant. There is always that worry that I’m going to start to sound like the human equivalent of Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” That was a short story he’d written in English, then he stumbled across it translated into French, was appalled, and as a lark, decided to retranslate it into English from the French. The final product was this thrice-baked atrocity of Franglish where all the prepositions are in the wrong place. So yes, I worry.

You have this anecdote about Vladimir Nabokov in the book: He spoke Russian, French, and English, but found it painful to translate his memoir of his boyhood in Russia into English. Is When in French going to be published in French? Are you going to translate it? It’s being translated into French for Groupe Flammarion, [to be published] next year. I’m not the translator. I had a few meetings with her; they were fascinating. It’s this conflict of authority. It wasn’t an adversarial process, but it was such an interesting question: Who is the more credible authority on my life in French? Someone who speaks the language far better than I do? Or me? The wiser position is to cede your voice to someone who can actually speak your voice better than you can.

Have you read the translation? What strikes you about it? Is the French you different from the English you? I’m never going to attain the ease and confidence of my English in French. Even assuming one were able to master the language on a grammatical level, which I certainly haven’t, there’s the question of how it’s actually used. I remember when we were going over the manuscript, there’s a line in the book about how my in-laws are juilletistes, people who take vacation in July. I knew it was something of an odd duck. My translator was like, “You know people don’t ever say that, right?” She was like, “People only say that on the nightly news. It’s like saying: It’s going to be a scorcher out there!” I had no idea I was sounding like Will Ferrell in Anchorman the whole time.

There’s this wonderful passage where Olivier complains that speaking to you in English is like touching you with gloves on. Are you walking around Paris these days with gloves on? Yes, in a way. Most of the time you’re glad to have some kind of impermeable membrane between you and half the people you bump up against in the course of your day. It’s interesting, because not having perfect command of the language holds you back in so many ways, but it also lets you operate with a certain freedom and impunity that people who don’t have “foreigner” written in red letters on their forehead don’t get to indulge in. So I don’t know. Sometimes I feel that if I could rip the gloves off and throw them on the floor and roll up my sleeves and get my grubby little hands out there groping everything . . . .

I’m at the point now where I get the facts of the story, when someone’s telling me something that happened. But I can’t make the sort of judgments I can in English, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good to have to hew a little more closely to content, sometimes, rather than delivery. I’m missing all kinds of cues. All I can listen to is really the words that people are saying.